The German Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur or BNetzA) has published the results of the April 2018 solar PV auction round. The tender was oversubscribed and 59 offers came out for a total capacity of 360 MW: 28 bids were selected for a total combined capacity of 183 MW. The average bidding rate stood at €4.59c/kWh (€4.33c/kWh during the previous round), with the highest bidding rate at €4.96/kWh.
The last tender took place in October 2017 and the BNetzA received 110 bids with a total volume of 754 MW with an average bid size of 6.9 MW. Only 20 bids won the round and a total capacity of 222 MW was awarded. The maximum bidding price during this tender was set at €8.84c/kWh. The average bidding rate reached €4.91c/kWh (€49.1/MWh), with the highest bid achieving €5.06c/kWh and the lowest one €4.29c/kWh. Three out of the 20 successful bids obtained a volume higher than 20 MW.
Since the beginning of 2017, solar and wind power projects bigger than 750 kW have to compete in tenders in order to secure power purchase deals, as feed-in tariff (FiT) contracts are no longer available. As a result, the German solar market is becoming increasingly competitive and showed strong cost reduction.